The Ninth Circuit says a Malaysian woman can appeal her placement on the FBI’s no-fly list. Timothy Lee at Ars Technica applauds:

If the FBI or TSA genuinely suspected that Ibrahim was a terrorist, they should have been actively investigating her and preparing to arrest her; as a Stanford student, she can’t have been hard to track down. If she wasn’t a terrorist — and by all indications, she’s wasn’t — then harassing her at the airport is a gratuitous infringement of her civil liberties. The no-fly list allows federal officials to act like they’re “doing something” about terrorism without taking responsibility for actually investigating and charging terrorism suspects.

U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC’s review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts – not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.

California’s Supreme Court has struck down the use of non-compete clauses in employment contracts in that state. (Opinion here.) All to the good, I think. A company has the right to protect its intellectual property. Society, however, has an interest in seeing to it that people can work in their chosen fields of expertise.